When Demarkus Higginbotham was robbing people at ATMs on Detroit’s west side, his distinctive tattoos ultimately led to his capture.

Detroit Police pulled images of them from security cameras and printed them on fliers that were circulated until someone identified him. The flyers were an effective but slow means to identification.

Today, police could do it faster through a tattoo database created by a Michigan State University professor.

“Every tattoo has some story behind it, especially those which are associated with criminals,” said Anil Jain, a distinguished professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University, who created Tattoo-ID, the database of tattoos taken from booking photos and other sources.

Jain’s database now includes more than 100,000 images of tattoos and is the electronic equivalent of the flyers Detroit police used to catch Higginbotham. Michigan State Police provided many of the initial images and use the database to help with their work.

Jain began creating the database in 2009 at MSU with a grant from the FBI. The university later licensed it to MorphoTrak, a biometric company with headquarters in Anaheim, Calif., that sells access to it to police across the U.S. and Canada.

Jain said the database made sense because of the growing number of people who have tattoos. By some estimates, as many as one-third of young adults in the U.S. now have a tattoo.

What’s more, tattoos are used to signify membership in most of the world’s large criminal gangs, Jain said. Even if a suspect is being arrested for the first time, investigators can learn from the tattoo the gang affiliation of the wearer.

Jain said police had long noted the tattoos of criminal suspects, but the way they were stored made searching difficult. Most of the tattoos were entered into a database with one key word to describe them, such as sunset or wolf. But many tattoos include multiple images and can’t be categorized in a single word, Jain said.

“They weren’t getting too many hits,” he said. “That’s why we said we will explore this from an image matching standpoint.”

Jain’s system allows officers to enter photographs of tattoos and have the computer search for similar images.

“Tattoos are not uniquely matched to a suspect, but they help narrow down the search,” Jain said. “Basically we showed, if we have a query and the tattoo resides in the database, we could find it about 90% of the time.”

He said the system doesn’t specifically identify the objects showcased by the tattoos. Instead, it identifies different points in the tattoo called landmarks, which could be spots where the shading of a tattoo changes or where the coloration ends. The system also could note geometric designs, which are common in tattoos.

“What we are looking for is a near duplicate tattoo image,” Jain said.

He noted that the same tattoo could be photographed differently using different cameras or under different lighting conditions, so the landmarks are more accurate. Also, tattoos can change size slightly as a person gains or loses weight.

Because tattoos don’t provide a precise match to an individual, tattoos are typically used in conjunction with other identifiers such as fingerprints or facial recognition to confirm a match, Jain said.

“We would not solely ID someone on that, but I think it could be a help,” said Patricia Rolland, operations director for the Macomb County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Rolland said she hasn’t used the database but can see its usefulness. Tattoos are very personal, and the medical examiner’s office gets a growing number of requests from family members who want photos of their loved ones’ tattoos.

“If the family didn’t have a picture of that tattoo, they want a picture of it so that another family member can replicate it,” Rolland said.

Still, it remains an inexact science. When several grapefruit-sized pieces of human remains were found in a sewer in Sterling Heights in 2012, investigators noted the tattoos on them and photographed them. They released the photos publicly hoping to jog someone’s memory, but so far no identification has been confirmed, said Lt. Dave Smith.

“Some blood work showed the individual was female,” he said. “But being in a sewer, it may not have happened in our city. It may have been someone disposing of body parts.”